But then the wounded teacher comes to visit. There is a graphic illustration of boy throwing a book at his white teacher and breaking his nose. When he sees his mother's name in a geometry textbook in class, he just cannot bear that his generation are still studying from the same books as the last. Junior might have brain damage from surgery and seizures but he is following in grandmother's footsteps, engaged with the world, full of anger and energy. In fact Junior only knows five Indians who have never drunk alcohol, one of them being his bandana-wearing grandmother: 'Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling.' His another-life father is hip, a professional saxophonist. His could-have-been mother is smart in her suit, a community college teacher. For example, he describes on one page how it 'sucks to be poor', and on the next sketches portraits of his parents as they might have been if someone had paid attention to their dreams. He can at least express what it's like living his life. He feels like rubbish, gets beaten up as a matter of course because he lisps, stutters and looks like a freak, but with a pen in his hand he finds a sense of being 'important'. Absolutely.Īrnold Spirit Jnr, known simply as Junior on the rez, speaks directly to the reader and is both narrator and illustrator, a cartoonist. This one makes no bones about it and yet skilfully manages to transform his actual experience into a novel. Many authors hum and ha when asked if their fiction is in any way autobiographical. And in his teens he attended Reardan High School, off the reservation, near the rich farm town, where all the other students were white. He was, like his central character, hydrocephalic at birth, 'with too much grease inside my skull'. He grew up where the book is set, on a reservation - the 'rez' - in Wellpinit, Washington state. Sherman Alexie was born a Spokane Indian.

The true story of a part time indian